Bother

‘George, shut up I’m watching this and promise me, promise me that if I die you’ll keep an eye out for our Billy.’ I think she said that, but everything sounded the same with her teeth out and I may have imagined it was that and not, ‘just make me a cuppa,’ which she usually said, even when she had one sitting on the little wobbly table next to her armchair.

Life is sometimes obituary after obituary: your hair, your teeth, being able to touch your toes and the promises you make to your Ma on her deathbed. Well, it wasn’t really her deathbed, because she was watching Coronation Street and telling me to shush with all my nonsense. I’d been sitting in the chair without a hole in the cushions, telling her how my wife had left me and taken my three kids and was going to stay with my best friend, Bobbie. And all she was interested in was Bet Lynch. Well, not Bet Lynch, that’s the only one I can ever remember when Coronation Street is on. Her and Albert Tatlock. But he’s been dead for years, so it must have been Bet Lynch.

I’d a few to help me through Coronation Street and so nodded solemnly and may even have fell asleep at about 8.30pm before I said I would. And I meant it. I could hear my old man saying: there was no going back on it when you make a promise young fellow Well, not literally, saying, because he’d been dead for ten years, but talking through the drink, which was near enough, an approximation to somebody saying something, a bit like spiritualists, only smaller and coming in cans of McEwans when you talk to yourself. People had been saying that I was getting more like my old man every day. I liked to think otherwise because people also called him Pongo, for some childish reason.

‘Fuck that,’ I said, because I’d taken to talking to myself since mum had the dementia gene about 8.32pm that made you go doo-wally after hitting the speed neurospindle limit of 67 years.

Since I was technically homeless, I was her carer. It was quite a simple job. It’s a common fallacy that old women with dementia like to walk about outside with their nightgowns on. All I had to do was make sure all the doors were locked to disprove it. I don’t know how she got out. Our next-door neighbour Mr Bell spotted her crying by the duck pond. I don’t know why. I thought she liked ducks. She used to take us there all the time, until one of my sisters drowned in the bath. It wasn’t the ducks' fault, but it was no more mouldy blue bread for them. Anyway, Mr Bell did that heroic, neighbourly thing, bringing her back in his Fiat Panda and walking her up the path as if he was still in the police. He still knew how to do that police rap on the door, with three knuckles. I think they used to have a training school for it. That all went out the window when they started employing small fat birds because of equality, or something. My Linda fitted right in there. A career and a stay at home husband. That was me. I planned to do an Open University degree in computing. That was all the rage then, when computers were the size of telephone boxes and texts books were like atlases of the world in 3D, all squiggles and scrolls and cool names that would have been good if you were in a band, which I was, because I had to unwind. I couldn’t be doing with all that boffin stuff all the time. Linda didn’t seem to understand that. When she came in I went out. Me and Terry Ross had to practice. We didn’t get paid much, just enough to keep us in beers and a few smokes, a little hash, a bit of coke when it was going. We were pretty good. We even got to play a gaff in Byres Road. Some of those young birds, students, they flung themselves at you. I didn’t like to disappoint. I’ve always been a people person. I’d a few run ins with Mr Bell when I was younger and I knew I looked dog-rough, so I knew how to play him.

‘I hope you’ve not been feeling her up.’ I looked at mum’s housecoat for evidence, but there were only bits of tomato soup on the collar and forensics was never my strongest suit. I gave Mr Bell the eye, but he was already striding away hurrmph-harumphing, probably looking for his handcuffs, because I was one up on him.

When mum died I felt I’d cheated her, because I’d said I was look after Billy, but I was Billy. She’d confused me with George. I’d become a homeowner and joined the local bowling club. I tried to make amends as best I could. I’d asked Mr Bell if I could join his branch of the Masons on Dumbarton Road. He was very good about it. I joined the Knights of St Columba to spite him. But in a funny way I felt I owed it to my mum to try and save George. In computing terminology I think they’d have said there was an inverse relationship between a promise made and a promise broken.